May 16 - The case for three day weekends

Take today for instance.

8am Wake up, read. snooze and chat for another hour. Get up, shower, breakfast. I sort the laundry, Deb puts a load on and starts tidying while I do the dishes.
10.30am Drive into town. We need to buy some heaters, so stop off and get an oil-filled heater for the nursery to be and a fan heater for the kitchen. Pay the bill for the curtain. Look at rugs. Eat a sausage from a sausage sizzle.
11.45am Drive into my work. Eat lunch at the cafe there, very nice lattes. I go up and get some stuff from the office I'd forgotten yesterday. Quick look in the bookshop.
1pm Home again. House no cleaner. More laundry. Dust, vacuum and tidy throughout house. Take stuff down to the shed that somehow hasn't taken itself down.
2.30pm Finally finished, for today, the chores and errands that needed doing.

Anyway, my point is, it takes most of a Saturday to just get our lives in some sort of order and do various things we'd put off during the week. And once that's done, we're usually too tired to do much else.

Sunday's, then, are days for doing what should be done in a weekend. Relaxing, going out, eating, exercising, movieing, doing stuff around the house. But the joy of Sunday is always tempered, around mid-afternoon, by the realisation that you've got to go to work tomorrow. And that starts becoming increasingly important as you begin to get your mind ready to handle that.

So, you really do need a third day in the weekend. That would take the burden off Sunday and you could just enjoy the day. And the third day, say Monday, you would be rested, relaxed and able to gently move yourself towards the working week.

Yesterday I finished work a little early and went on a class trip with Deb's Communication class.  There's an exhibition at the Art Gallery - 'The exhibition of the Century', a collection of modern art from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The class got a guided tour around the exhibition and I tagged along as well.

There's a wonderful line in the movie 'Afterglow'. The main character, a handyman played by Nick Nolte, is looking at some art hanging in a yuppie woman's home. He says, "I don't know what I like, but I know what art is. And that's art"

That was kinda my reaction to the art exhibition. I didn't quite know what I liked, but by god it was art. There were painting by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Mondrian, Pollock, Lichtenstein and Kandinsky - among others.

Actually, I did enjoy it. And want to go back and take more time looking. Seeing the scale and vibrancy and colour of the paintings in real life, as opposed to in a book, or on a postcard or a t-shirt, can take your breath away. Maybe I just need to look at more paintings.

Oh, and finally, bought a connection that should allow me to record real audio from my stereo, ie records and tapes as opposed to just cd's on the computer. Gonna try it out now.

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